Tech Transformation Not All Good

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Tech Transformation Not All Good

GENEVA – The United Nations' push to transform the developing world into tech-ready nations could partly backfire, delegates to an IT summit aimed at bridging the digital divide said on Thursday.

The overwhelming consensus at the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society summit this week is that bringing the Internet and telecom innovations to the world's poor is a noble cause that needs embracing now.

But there are unpredictable consequences that also need to be considered, experts said.

"There are a number of non-trivial issues that come with overcoming the digital divide," said Alan Greenberg, a Canadian IT consultant who works with the World Bank on programs aimed at bringing new technologies to the developing world.

"Security is one of them. Whether it be viruses or worms, or various forms of fraud, they will be coming to developing countries too. There are no barriers," he said.

The need for international measures to fight computer virus outbreaks and step up prosecution of cybercriminals has been a constant topic of the three-day event – particularly among representatives of the developed world.

This cautionary note contrasts sharply with the pleas from heads of state in poorer countries for the West to urgently step up technological aid to developing countries.

Bridging the gap between the technology "haves" and "have nots" is a crusade that began in the late 1990s, and this summit is testament to its slow but steady progress.

The United Nation's ambition is to help eradicate poverty and create stable state democracies by using new technologies to improve access to vital information.

Poor communities from India to Nepal can report success stories of how the Internet has brought advances in farming, schools and health care.

But the march of technology has had some unforeseen social consequences too, as news written in languages incomprehensible to all but a few gets beamed in daily.

One Indian fishing village in the Tamil Nadu region that relies on the Internet for weather updates has one terminal for 7,000 inhabitants, said Rajamohan KG, an adviser for the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a tech aid group.

Because the children have – like everywhere else – the greatest facility with the Internet, they often have access to information vital to the village's fishermen. "They are respected, like the village elders," he said. Others called the English-language-dominated Internet a potential threat if it fails to reflect the planet's diversity.

"I cannot fail to mention the importance of using the information society to maintain our planet's rich linguistic and cultural diversity," Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga told U.N. delegates in an address on Wednesday.

Other dignitaries used the occasion to urge software developers to embrace open-source software programs, or customizable computer applications that can be tweaked into a local language or configured for specific needs.

But open-source software, while cheap or free to install, has its drawbacks, as one delegate from SchoolNetAfrica pointed out.

Sara Kyofuna, a spokeswoman for the group, which is looking for a donation of a million PCs for the continent's classrooms, said open-source software is too complicated for some schools to run, and, if something goes wrong, there are no support staff.

"Problems arise. We now know that if something works in Uganda, in Mozambique it will frustrate you to zero," Kyofuna said.